imatfaal

Amanda - there is an "internet law" within rationalist circles called Poe's law - from the Rationalist Wiki "Poe's Law is an axiom suggesting that it's difficult to distinguish between parodies of religious fundamentalism (or, more generally, parodies of any crackpot or extremist belief) and its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane." I am afraid I believe your posts have reached this point - this is a thread titled " Wall Street Protestors: Do they lack a clear message?" and your input is so far from being a "clear message" that I find it hard to know if you are ironically trolling this subject or just don't realise that the requests for clarity are not merely a debating tactic. I think that I might agree with you - my doubt on that matter is because I cannot truly ascertain what it is you are saying; and in a thread decrying the lack of clarity in the message this strikes me as ironic and sad.

For a one off bloom through the day - ie start the day tightly closed and slowly open up over the course of a few hours per the real thing. You could experiment with wet/dry origami - folded and creased paper will tend to unfold as small amounts of water move through it. If I was doing this I would do it purely mechanically. Anchor petals to a disk and to a point of a stem passing through the centre of the disk. When the anchor point is far from the disk the petals will be forced to be almost parallel to the stem, but when the point is allowed to move closer to the disk the angle will allow the petals to spread. It would be a very fiddley build but by no means impossible

Does that mean I have to work late to maintain the cosmic balance? Damn!

Way to go BC photographer!! And I am glad I could help. did you get to the cache or just decipher the message?

Surely, if we are being picky (and I do enjoy being picky) it would not be clairvoyance but precognition. Clairvoyance Precognition

OK here is a test you can do that would astound critics and get people to take you very seriously indeed. For the next few Saturdays - between 1930 and 1945 London time pick 6 numbers between 1 and 49 and post them here with a time stamp well prior to 2000hours. No one will be able to use your gift for financial gain as the uk national lottery draw closes at 1930hours - but, in the absence of better controls, it will provide a very useful gauge of how much credence should be given to your claims.

cubic are not asymptotic to values of x - whereas that curve looks as if y will tend toward -ve infinity as x approaches d (and for x=0). ie cubic equations do not have a value of x for which y is not defined but this one does. Shape-wise it does look like a cubic - but the cubic heads off to infinity for both x and y - not just y

Bad choices of subjects for the splash screen - and a few more "virtually"s and "practically"s - but fascinating stuff

CERN/OPERA Gran Sasso was set up to look at the oscillations of neutrinos between the three flavours of neutrino; the electron neutrino νe the mu neutrino νμ and the tau neutrino ντ. CERN was able to use a proton beam striking a graphite wall to produce a beam of mesons that with a little filtering and magnetic channelling would end up decaying and producing a beam (not sure if it was a beam or a burst) of almost solely νμ. This beam of νμ was directed at Gran Sasso ~730km away. Gran Sasso was set up to detect ντ however - and it was hoped that accurate measurements of the number ντ could give insight into the probabilities of oscillation. I haven't read up on the Gran Sasso detectors (lotsa lead and photo-multipliers) so I cannot say if they were only detecting ντ - but I presume they must have been able to either measure only ντ or differentiate ντ from νμ and νe for their experiment to work

I asked the question in that way because I believe it would be impossible to ban excessive drinking - I think it would be highly regrettable and almost impossible to ban all drinking; but to set a limit would be impossible. I think, on balance, drinking is a positive for society and that all the many ills are balanced and more by the relaxing, interaction-enhancing goodness of a pint of beer. At present society deals with the negatives of drinking and benefits from the positives - those who advocat a ban or reduction must also deal with the harm any new measures will cause as well as focussing on the alleged benefits ps It's Friday! I was out at lunch. Who is going out tonight? I am as well

100 micrograms is enormous ! Do you have a link to the paper?

I think there is fairly general agreement that drinking to excess is very bad - and very few posters have said that moderate drinking is bad; so we are left with a quandary. Do any of the posters who think drinking is bad for society believe that we should implement alcohol bans? I realise this is moving from a hypothetical to a practical question - but I think it is interesting

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City Well here is the declaration that I think is most official in the strictly non-hierarchical horizontally arranged structure that is the revolutionary tooting popular front NYC General Assembly. As all have commented (apart from am) it is very wishy washy - and more a list of nebulous grievances and politics 101 ideas of participatory democracy - but none of this makes it a bad idea or a worthless pursuit. Yes it is naive and overly idealistic, and yes it provides zero economic insight but the very factor that mass demonstrations are occuring is a timely reminder for those who can and do undertake political/economic analyses that there is a ground swell of opinion. Upon reading it I was reminded of the phrase "no democracy without congresses of the people" - but as that was gaddaffi's early mantra perhaps they should give that one a miss.

O/T a bit. But if you can use BBC iplayer in your region then I would recommend the Frost on Satire shown last night on BBC4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00srhgn/Frost_on_Satire/ The reason this springs to mind was the affect that the TIna Fey impersonation had on Sarah Palin's presidential hopes

But to even mobilise society to seek a solution in the first place it needs to be recognised and accepted that a problem exists. To extend TomS's metaphor - I do not need to know what is wrong with my car, all I need to say is that it has petrol, the battery is charged yet it won't start - I call the RAC mechanic who understands the sub-systems. And no matter how many times a mechanic tells me the theory is good and all the individual systems are working fine if the car won't move when it should then there is a problem. And STFU has no part of any discussion Father Ted's protest - worth a watch Down with this sort of thing

To add to your positive list Capt - the banning of alcohol from a society creates far more problems than the alcohol itself. I have agreed with almost all yu have said - and I will re-emphasise the importance of booze as an interaction facilitator. I work in central london and my trip back home after work is considerably cheered by the pubs I walk past that are overflowing with happy, talking, laughing and flirting punters. Every single one of the arguments presented would work just as well (badly) replacing alcohol consumption with individual car use for mass transportation

it is not necessary in either science or politics to be able to provide a solution as a prerequisite for claiming that a system is wrong. It is highly desirable to be able to posit an alternative rationale - but it cannot be essential to disproving a position; all one needs to do is to show that the current theory is incorrect and does not produce the results that are intended. I realise from your other posts that you are not a reactionary - but your argument plays straight into the hands of the powerful, who claim that the present system "works just fine", and that any other system must be fully functioning ab initio. The motivation for change is that the system has failed/is failing - it isn't the crash that doom-sayers predict daily, it is the divorce between productivity and reward, the wall street tail wagging the manufacturing/producing dog ... the triumph of debt over capital. I believe it is important to state clearly that a system is broken even when the minutiae of the corruption is beyond you. This forum is one of the few places I know with people who would be capable of understanding the intricacies of the market ( I freely admit I don't - but I know very bright people who have spent lives trying to) .

Have you tried just using a monoalphabetic substitution cipher? There seem to be about 23-25 different combinations - ie treat 444 as a single encoded letter. It is a nice variant on monoalphabetic if that is the case - the repeated digits immediately make you think that 3,33, and 333 must be connected in some way; but they could just be keying I, M, and A as an example. there are really good monoalphabetic substitution crackers available on the internet for download - I would give it a try, but I have just shifted to linux and I am having trouble with even the basics right now. Good indications of a monoalphabetic cipher are the number of different encoded bits (I think about right from a rough count), a characteristic distribution (any decent length normal english text will have around 12pct Es and definitely not all equal - again looks ok), an acceptable number of double letters, and very few triples (zoo opening before any one say no english word has a triple - spaces are very rarely encrypted) please let us know if you get any further

We in the UK have practically the same consumption in litres per person per year as the Netherlands - yet our social problems are very different; perhaps there is little actual correlation with alcohol consumption? And even if there is correlation between social problems and alcohol consumption Correlation IS NOT causation; it is just as likely that those countries with deep-rooted social problems have low levels of happiness, which in turn cause their inhabitants to have a drink as the sole amelioration in a desperate existence. that is is to say that without proof it is equally probably that raised alcohol consumption is cause OR effect. Looking at the list of countries by alcohol consumption on Wikipedia - I must say that I have spent extended periods in 6 of the top 25, and found the people welcoming, friendly, and cheerful - all of which I would return to at the drop of a hat (incl R'dam Capt P!) . I have visited 4 of the bottom 20 and would only want to return to one of them - a major problem being the repressive and restrictive nature of the society (which to an extent concerned the prohibition on alcohol but mainly the disgraceful treatment of women)

Frankly Hal - as a fair proportion of my expanded family survive on the royalties from book sales I would kinda prefer that you didn't. Unfo we live in a world where educators are pretty poorly paid - and whilst the money from academic book sales is minuscule compared to fiction and biographies - it can still make a nice difference and reward those who have spent many years creating text books for students

The most disappointing (viewing experience vs hype & word of mouth) = Arachnaphobia

Any charged particles in the rockets exhaust might start off super-aqua-luminal and would provide a beautiful display of Cherenkov radiation edit damn too slow

Sorry Tom you have lost me there. a very long time: / the star Betelgeuse/ the star Betelgeuse / the star Betelgeuse / the zenith / the program Stellarium I cannot see a problem with any of them. I would prefer "which" rather that "what" perhaps - but otherwise...

My reading of the paper is that it is only producing electricity not oil - that the CO2 is not all captured (about 50% of normal energy production), it is a very long term project, technologies are by no means ready, and there are geophysical problems with that much carbon capture and storage. nature reported a few months ago that carbon capture and storage is a very touchy subject and there is little academic agreement on what is safe and that many of the licences given seem to be based on political expediency rather than research finding. oil shale and oil sands (ven has huge amounts of sands as does can) are a great potential resource and research is needed to best understand how to use the oil shale - but it is not the panacea needed at present and will not solve the potential future energy debt. As the US chomps its way through 2* 10^7 barrels of oil per day, a resource in the order of 10^12 would be mighty useful - however I could not find any mention of the percentage of potential crude that this method would utilise (a few / ten percent in difficult areas is not unusual)

Hello Martyr - my maths is way below most of the guys on the forum so I look forward to an answer from them -cos mine is screwed. Whenever I try this I get an non-real value for p. My method which is clearly wrong (cos I dont get a real value for p) is to set up an function as follows [math] (x-(1-i))(x-(1+i))(x+a)=0 [/math] ie roots are [math](1-i) (1+i) (-a) [/math] multiply this out [math] (x^2 -x -ix -x +ix +2)(x+a)=0[/math] [math] (x^2 -2x +2)(x+a)=0[/math] [math]x^3 -2x^2+2x+ax^2-2ax+2a=0[/math] put like terms together [math]x^3 +x^2(a-2)+x(2-2a)+2a =0[/math] you now have two cubics - the one in the question, and the one you have constructed. the coefficients must be the same for the question to work (i hope) so coeffs x^3 term 1=1 ok coeffs x^2 term p=a-2 coeffs x^1 term q = 2-2a coeffs x^0 term pq = 2a that gives you three equations with three unknowns - which should be solvable, if a real solution exists. But pretty soon - after rearranging you end up with [math] 2p^2 +4p+4=0 [/math] but the problem is that per the quadratic solution equation [math] b^2-4ac = 16-4.2.4=-16[/math] ie unreal solutions I really hope someone comes in an give a decent answer - cos I cannot see it . sorry to be so useless